That's according to research by Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman of the Wharton School. They won the 2017 William F. O'Dell Award, which honors the article that has made the most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice, for their paper "What Makes Online Content Viral?"
August 5, 2017
-American Marketing Society
Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman from the University of Pennsylvania examined 7,000 articles from the New York Times. They found that positive articles were shared more often than negative ones. Is happiness contagious?
July 28, 2017
-Inc.
Research by Katherine Milkman, John Beshears and colleagues finds that psychological nudges can be a cost-effective way for governments to get citizens to do the right thing.
July 19, 2017
-Harvard Business School
Spearheaded by UCLA’s Shlomo Benartzi, and including Beshears, Thaler, Sunstein, and the Wharton School’s Katherine Milkman, among others, the group settled on four areas of particular interest to nudge units in the United States and United Kingdom—retirement savings, college enrollment, public health interventions, and energy consumption. They then identified a single metric of success in each of the four areas and reviewed every paper that was focused on that success metric and that was published in a top academic journal in the last 15 years.
July 19, 2017
-Forbes
“It’s a very robustly studied phenomenon,” Katherine Milkman, an associate professor at The Wharton School of Business, told TODAY. “It can lead to an enormous number of traps.”
June 17, 2017
-TODAY
“The third most popular resolution for 2017 was making better financial decisions. If your goal is to become a better steward of your hard-earned money, what does it take to improve your odds of succeeding once you decide to make some positive financial changes?”
June 7, 2017
-Forbes
According to a study published by Katherine Milkman in 2014, bundling temptations helps us overcome “time inconsistency,” the notion that we all tend to value immediate rewards much more than future ones.
April 27, 2017
-HuffPost
Recent surveys show that overworked Americans put work-life balance near the top of their wish lists — but if the experts can’t seem to manage it, how can the rest of us ever hope to? According to Katherine Milkman, at least part of the problem with work-life conflict is simply the overly optimistic way we humans tend to plan (or, worse, not plan) for the future.
March 28, 2017
-The Cut
“TODAY talked with two experts, including Katherine Milkman, to find out which resolutions are hardest to keep, and how you can still tackle them.”
December 30, 2016
-TODAY
“It can be hard to overcome the inertia of inaction or bad habits, but the positive expectations about “next week,” “next month,” or “next year” might help people to get going. Indeed, researchers have found that people do at least take the first step on these new beginnings.”
December 29, 2016
-Scientific American
“Studies show that even arbitrary, nonessential objects can become powerful cues for memory. Which goes to show it’s not just priceless family jewels or heirlooms that make for memory cues; they can be anything imbued with meaning. Earlier this year, psychologists Todd Rogers and Katherine Milkman published a paper demonstrating this neatly.”
December 23, 2016
-Vox
It can be hard to motivate yourself to go to the gym after a grueling day at the office. Use temptation bundling to help get you off the couch and back on the treadmill.
December 7, 2016
-Reader's Digest
An overview of Prof. Milkman’s research and undergraduate career at Princeton for the Princeton Alumni Weekly.
October 26, 2016
-Princeton Alumni Weekly
The idea is to link a want (in the study, listening to audio versions of page-turners such as the Hunger Games books) with a popular should (working out at the campus fitness center). If getting on a treadmill were the only way to hear the next chapter in the novel, would you be more likely to get off the couch and go to the gym?
October 21, 2016
-New York Magazine
People don’t just use these landmarks to organize the memories of their lives; we use them to organize memories of ourselves, too, something they call “temporal self-appraisal.” Maybe you did not make a ton of progress over the summer on the book you’re writing (or whatever), but that was summer you. This is September you!
September 1, 2016
-New York Magazine
An interview with Professor Jihae Shin of the Wisconsin School of Business, and Professor Katherine Milkman of the Wharton School on their research on the impact of backup plans on overall performance.
September 2016
-Harvard Business Review
Jihae Shin and Katherine Milkman’s results showed that those who made those backup plans ended up performing worse on the task at hand. And the researchers’ follow-up questions showed that this was due, at least in part, to a diminished drive for success.
August 17, 2016
-The Washington Post
The best-laid plans are those that don’t include backup plans. In a series of studies, Jihae Shin and Katherine Milkman found that when people make a backup plan for their goals, their performance on the primary goal can suffer because they tend to put less effort into achieving the primary goal.
August 16, 2016
-The Wall Street Journal
To help conquer the challenges of forgetting to do something, Katherine Milkman and co-author Todd Rogers find that the key to remembering may actually be something completely unrelated to your intention – and something that stands out from the routine of everyday life.
August 15, 2016
-Knowledge@Wharton
Human beings are naturally loss averse. On the one hand, back-up plans are useful fail-safe measures. On the other hand, back-up plans can become excuses—leading people to give-up before failure is even apparent.
August 5, 2016
-Boston Globe
